In yoga, you always get what you want. This is not to say you get it exactly the way you want it or that you can just throw out ‘wishes’ and magically receive free babysitting and lots of new clothes (my wishes are fairly modest these days). But I’m currently having this experience with things that I have really wanted, often for some time.
I like to tell this to students who are new to me that this
will happen to them, too. I tell
them that if they want a good stretch, they’ll get just that. If they want to know the secrets of the
universe, they can. If they want
to do crow pose, I don’t see any reason that cannot happen in good time and
practice. Sometimes they get more
than they bargained for along the way.
Seven years ago, I worked for The Bank and would go on lunch
breaks (sometimes a couple a day) to this park in TriBeCa near our
offices. I would sit on the
benches in my barely-corporate clothing, read a fashion magazine, try not to
eat, and daydream about being one of those moms playing in that park with their
little kids. I imagined myself
being a yoga teacher and mom to a boy named Van, living a life of happiness and
luxury. This fall, as I sat in
that very same park, I realized that is exactly what I’m doing.
Don’t be mistaken, though. One of every five women in New York City is a yoga teacher
these days. Many of us are very
good, but we still only get a three-minute audition at our local gym along with
everyone else. My bank account is
currently a sad state of affairs, and our family arrangement is such that my
husband works so much that we often don’t see him for days at a stretch. It has taken me over a year to find
another mom in my neighborhood with whom to have weekday-morning pancake
breakfasts. I’m not being
ungrateful here. I’m being
real. (I really believe we do
ourselves and others like us a disservice when we only show the life-is-perfect
Facebook-update versions of ourselves.)
And yet, this realization has given me permission to really
want the life I have, to love it, and to radically affirm it. I’m getting more than I bargained
for.
Next week, I leave for India with Douglas Brooks, on a trip
that I have wanted to be on for years, the trip that I announced at the
beginning of 2012 that I would be on.
Changes in work, finances, and our yoga community during the year made
this trip seem more than impossible.
What has made it possible is the optimism of a dear friend, beneficence
from a long-suffering partner, and willingness to step up from grandmas in two
states. In one word, love.
Once, in a discussion about major and minor deities, Douglas
said that if you’re looking for something specific, it’s not necessary to go to
the little local deity for that specific thing. If you want a pregnancy, then probably really what you’re
wanting is love and intimacy. So,
go to the major deity and invite that energy more into your life (by whatever
means, mantra, mudra, etc.), and you’ll get what you want.
We’ve probably all had the converse experience of getting
some desired outcome only to feel that we didn’t really get what we
wanted. See: child who plays with
the vacuum cleaner at someone else’s house only to completely ignore the
identical one you just bought.
What the child wanted was the playmate, or the stimulation of being in a
different place, or you to pay attention to him.
Probably what most of us really need is to have an
experience of unconditional love.
We experience that love through the conditions of our lives. In yoga, we call the energy that brings
us that experience Kali. She is
time, she is terrible, and she is the great mother. Through time and life all things are accomplished. May we love it along the way.
